Sailing to Byzantium, William Butler Yeats - Frederick L. Gwynn (essay date January 1953)
Frederick L. Gwynn (essay date January 1953)
SOURCE: Gwynn, Frederick L. “Yeats's Byzantium and its Sources.” Philological Quarterly 32, no. 1 (January 1953): 9-21.
[In the following essay, Gwynn explores the multiple meanings of Byzantium in “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Byzantium,” and A Vision, and identifies sources as diverse as Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Grimm's fairy tales, and Shakespeare's King Lear.]
“‘Sailing to Byzantium,’” Ellmann points out, “is full of echoes of Yeats's other works, of his reading, and of his experiences. In a sense he had been writing it all his life.”1 Ellmann gives us a half-dozen sources of phrases in the poem, items dating from Yeats's boyhood in the 1870s to a few weeks before September 26, 1926, when “Sailing to Byzantium” came into being. Ellmann's statement is also partially applicable to the poem's sequel, “Byzantium” (written...
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